Kristallnacht—Pogrom—State Terror: a Terminological Reflection

CHAPTER 1 Kristallnacht—Pogrom—State Terror: A Terminological Reflection by Ulrich Baumann and François Guesnet INTRODUCTION The past several decades have witnessed a major shift in terminology concerning the events of November 9 and 10, 1938 in Nazi Germany and Austria, namely from “Kristallnacht” to “Pogrom.” Given 1that the attacks against the Jewish population represented a major stepping stone from discrimination and exclusion of German and Austrian Jews to per- secution and violence, it seems remarkable that this shift in terminology—its context and motivations—has not been investigated by historians more care- fully. This chapter questions and challenges in particular the motives for the ubiquitous use of the term “pogrom,” both in academic and non-academic parlance, for this terror attack on the Jewish population under Nazi control in November 1938. “Pogrom” seems to reflect an urge for an expression commen- surate to the horror with which we view such a case of organized violence upon a defenseless minority. It furthermore avoids the risk in using a euphemism, such as “Kristallnacht,” a term which was apparently coined shortly after the events. For these good reasons, the term “Kristallnacht” has somewhat faded to the background. This chapter posits that the term “pogrom” is equally misleading, if only for a different set of reasons. As we will demonstrate, it refers in its original eastern European setting to interethnic violence in consequence of a breakdown 1 2 Ulrich Baumann and François Guesnet in the complex social and cultural interaction between majority and minority groups. The inaction or ambivalence in the attitude of state actors is of crucial relevance in these occurrences, very much in contrast to the events in 1938, when the Nazi regime unleashed its destructive potential on the already dimin- ished Jewish community under its control. Not in the least because of the cen- trality of the events in November 1938, it is more than appropriate to use more adequate terminology, as will be suggested in the conclusion of this chapter. In the immediate context of the events, a variety of terms were used. The perpetrators—various agencies of the Nazi regime—called the attack on German and Austrian Jewries an “Aktion,” the “Judenaktion,” “Vergeltungsaktion” (revenge action) or “Rath-Aktion,” after Ernst vom Rath, the murdered German diplomat. At that time, the oddly sarcastic and inap- propriate term “Reichskristallnacht” emerged. It is first recorded in June 1939, in a speech by the NSDAP speaker Wilhelm Börger (1896–1962), at a party convention in Lüneburg about the policies of the regime towards the Jews.1 In it, he referred to the term “Reichskristallnacht” as having “elevated [the attack on the Jews] through humour”:2 After the Reichskristallnacht last year, November 11, for instance— look, this matter enters history as Reichskristallnacht [applause, laughter]. You see, this has thus been elevated by humour, well. One might have asked, is this economically viable? One has to import the window panes from Belgium, for foreign currency. One can have different views of this. One thing however is for sure: they [the Jews] now know perfectly well: when one pushes the button, the bell rings, everywhere [laughter]. The most likely origin of the term “Reichskristallnacht” is Berlin popular parlance mocking the pomposity of Nazi vocabulary adding “Reich” to which- ever project the regime undertook. Both the reaction of the audience—made up of Nazi functionaries—as well as the flattered appropriation by Börger illus- trates the ambiguities of the term. The speech also reflects with great clarity the further reaching objectives in the Nazi hierarchy: “There has not been enough kicking [during Kristallnacht], they should have beaten the heads much more [laughter], and we would have been done by now [applause] .” 3 These quotes demonstrate that the term “Reichskristallnacht” resonated in ambiguous ways, on the one hand as expression of a distant attitude towards dictatorship (ironic enough not to be persecuted by the Gestapo), and on the other hand taken up and willingly misinterpreted, by a high-ranking Nazi. Kristallnacht—Pogrom—State Terror: A Terminological Reflection 3 This article first reflects on the term pogrom as it emerged in the eastern European context and how it has been discussed in recent scholarship. Additionally, we would like to shed light on the trajectory of the terminology used in the German and English languages. To that end, this article discusses how after the war, both Reichskristallnacht and Kristallnacht, the short version of the term, gained common currency in public as well as academic discourse, in both East and West Germany, Austria, and beyond German speaking coun- tries. Over time, however, it has been supplanted by the term “pogrom,” which has become almost ubiquitous in a range of variations, both in common parlance as well as in academic language. The use of terms likePogromnacht (pogrom night), Reichspogromnacht, Novemberpogrom or Novemberpogrome, was motivated by the hope, especially from the 1970s onwards, that such a terminology allowed one to avoid seemingly euphemistic terminology such as Kristallnacht, which was perceived as highly inadequate. The second part of the chapter will first focus on the postwar German context, and then on the emphatic use of the term pogrom outside of Germany, and mostly by Jewish authors after 1938. 2. “WHAT IS A POGROM?” THE TERMINOLOGY ON ANTI-JEWISH VIOLENCE IN EASTERN EUROPE Over the past generation, historians have broadened our understanding of anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe and the history of the term “pogrom.” The Russian term originally referred to widespread devastation, particularly in the context of wars. It was first used to identify anti-Jewish violence after the attack on the Jewish community in Odessa in 1871. The mass occurrence of anti-Jew- ish violence in 1881–82 led to a narrowing of its meaning in the Russian language to mark interethnic violence against Jews.4 In his recent analysis of the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, Steven Zipperstein presents convincing evidence that the term pogrom did not gain common currency beyond Russia before the early years of the twentieth century.5 Interethnic violence, including anti-Jewish violence, was a recurrent phenomenon across Europe since time immemorial. Both Jewish and non- Jewish contemporaries, however, considered the more than four hundred anti- Jewish riots in 1881–82 in Eastern Europe as a new phenomenon, for which the relatively recent term “pogrom” seemed appropriate. John D. Klier (1944– 4 Ulrich Baumann and François Guesnet 2007) argued that these incidents represented a major shift in anti-Jewish violence.6 Their novel character resided in the fact that they would take place in urban settings and that they were triggered by more recent developments of infrastructure like railways and telegraphs, and the wider dissemination of the press, which established the idea of the anti-Jewish pogrom in the popular mind, as Klier wrote.7 In their studies, Hans Rogger (1923–2002), I. Michael Aronson, and John D. Klier have rejected the hypothesis that the pogroms of 1881–82 had been ordered, inspired or triggered by the Tsar or higher echelons of the Russian imperial administration.8 They have emphasized the contrast between the very high number of incidents (four hundred between April 1881 and May 1882, in three major waves of violence) and the relatively low intensity of the violence itself: among the nearly forty fatalities, half were pogromists. Klier9 has also emphasized the virtual absence of religious framing in this instance, citing the example of Orekhov, Tauride province, where the synagogue was the only Jewish building that was not touched during the pogrom. The violence occurred in the southern provinces, which did not have a long history of Jewish residence and experienced considerable in-migration occasioned by rapid economic change.10 It was also in these southern provinces of the Empire that in 1903 the pogrom of Kishinev would mark the transition to a much more lethal pattern of pogrom violence: with forty-five Jewish victims, twice as many people were murdered in the three-day Kishinev pogrom of 1903 than during the hundreds of incidents of 1881–82. The pogroms of 1898 in Galicia, recently analyzed in depth by Tim Buchen, featured patterns very similar to those in Russia 1881–82: local residents turning against their Jewish neighbors after a period of intense political mobilization and the targeted spreading of rumors.11 A similar picture emerges from Darius Staliunas’ inves- tigation of the infrequent cases of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuanian provinces around the turn of the twentieth century.12 He follows the definition of pogrom violence of German sociologist Werner Bergmann, who describes a pogrom as “a one-sided, non-governmental form of social control.” Pogrom violence can be mobilized in situations when one group feels legitimated to get down to “self-help” against another group because it does not expect any support by the state.13 This definition reflects the significant impact of the competitive ethnic- ity model proposed by Roberta Senechal de la Roche. Among the ingredients for the triggering of interethnic violence, Senechal de la Roche identified the perception among a majority or hegemonic community of a perceived upward shift in the position of a minority or marginal community, combined with a Kristallnacht—Pogrom—State Terror:

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